


there can(not) only be one

by TheTartWitch



Category: Fire - Kristin Cashore
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cansrel dies later, Fire has a twin, Gen, let me know if you think this needs more tags, mindmeld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 15:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15776958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: Bren has always been there for Fire.





	there can(not) only be one

He sits tall on his horse, Kayel, content in his father’s protective shadow as they ride for King City for the first time together. Cansrel’s stallion strides strongly, more powerful than any of their guards’, but he slows for Fire, keeping pace beside Small. As a small kindness, Cansrel had chosen a stallion that reacted well with Small so Fire needn’t worry about her gentle horse being bullied.

He has long known his father shows no consideration for any but his young son and daughter, seen it in the human monster’s treatment of any servants or guards that displeased him, but it’s different, feeling the effect in the minds of the people they pass. They are simultaneously angry, flustered, and loving when they see Cansrel’s entourage enter the city. He sympathizes; every time his father is near, he and Fire react a similar way. Never angry, however, more patient and sad, waiting for the man who hoards them jealously in his estate to come and keep them company and then to leave.

\--

They are welcomed ostentatiously in the king’s own courtyards by Cansrel’s remaining servants. Kayel and Small are led quickly away, into Cansrel’s personal stables, and he and his sister are shown to their rooms. The minds in the palace are slightly fuzzy simply at the sight of them, at the news of Cansrel’s return, and he knows he will need to stay awake tonight and help Fire to sleep so they do not consume her.

They are adults now, grown and glowing with their father’s power now their own, and Cansrel would not have allowed their presence had they not shown they would be obedient of his wishes. 

Fire is not truly his twin; at the time of their conceptions, Cansrel had discovered a drug that made the world wonderfully slow and quiet and glossy, with a slight side effect of needing to bed every woman in the palace available to him. The result was that he missed two women in his hunt to destroy every trace of his possible children: Jessa, Fire’s mother, and a clever cook named Mida, his own mother. She was tanned, with long dark hair and nimble fingers and pale grey eyes, and the result was a child with Cansrel’s shimmering blue-black hair and glowing silver eyes, and she named him Bren, for the stars in one of her own mother’s stories from the edges of the Dells. She was later revealed to be a spy of a man waiting to assassinate the king, and was summarily executed. 

\--

Bren had yet to meet the king’s sons and daughter; Cansrel feared they’d try something unsavory towards his only children and kept them sequestered away in their chambers with trustworthy guards and anything they might desire. Fire was content with her fiddle and her music, playing a background to the glorious view outside their balcony, and Bren with his books and writings and his imaginings. Sometimes they convinced the guards to let them sneak and visit Kayel and Small in the stables, but not often. Cansrel might find out, and then they wouldn’t be able to go at all.

\--

They’re  presented to the court a week after their arrival. The queen greets them quietly, calmly, her mind a haven of clever thoughts and suspicion, but her king is boisterous and happy and congratulatory all over again, praising Cansrel’s children without lying. He looks at Fire thoughtfully for a few moments, but is still smart enough not to make any sort of gesture with Cansrel right at his shoulder. 

Nax’s sons are different. They glare at Bren and Fire with hatred, grown and unwilling to meet the two of whom Cansrel is so vocally proud. Fire bites her lip unhappily, but Bren simply looks away. He’s used to being disliked simply for being his father’s son. At least these people don’t want to hurt them the way so many dream of hurting Fire, or himself on rare occasions. 

Cansrel had forbidden Fire’s headscarf and Bren’s hats inside the palace; he found any effort to hide what they were repugnant and strange. Why keep their beauty a secret? Thus they make do with hiding from the populace as often as possible.

\--

They have been given a garden for use whenever they would like. It isn’t very large, only the size of a few large rooms, but over the top there is wire meshing to keep the monster raptors and birds from them and plenty of trees to create shadows. They have taken to napping in the shade on the long chairs left for them, trying to relax in a space that is supposed to be theirs, but mostly they read or greet the gardeners that enter at Cansrel’s discretion.

That’s what they’re doing when the little girl comes crawling through a hole in the wall with a small yapping dog: Fire is stretched out at Bren’s side, sleeping, and Bren is reading one of his favorite books again. He lowers it at the approach of the two young minds.

She’s curious but cautious, her mind guarded well against him for someone her age, and when he smiles to her it is dazzling but not confusing. He likes her already. 

“Hello,” she calls. “My name’s Hanna. Are you the young monster people?” 

“Yes,” he says, still smiling as she comes a little closer, up to his chair’s edge. 

“I used to play here with Blotchy, and now the other children can’t come so it’s even nicer than before.” She says, and her nose wrinkles at the mention of the other children. He laughs. Surprisingly, the sound doesn’t wake Fire.

“Well, you may play here if you like, but be sure to hide if there is anyone here but us two. In exchange, I will teach you to guard your mind even better than you do it now.” He tells her, motioning to Fire.

“Hm,” says Hanna deliberately, thinking it over. Her dog runs in dizzy circles around her legs, too excited by his presence to sit still. “Alright. It’s a deal.”

\--

She is with him and Fire during the next attempt on their lives, and he sweeps her up high into a tree to keep her out of the assassins’ way and shushes her quickly. 

Luckily, they’re too interested in Fire and himself to notice the girl, but Blotchy successfully makes enough of a nuisance of himself that Fire and Bren can end the fight. Due to Cansrel’s paranoia they’ve taken multiple lessons on how to defend themselves, and their guards are always quick to offer new moves.

By the time Cansrel and the palace guards burst through the garden’s doors, the princes hot on their heels, every assassin is lying on the ground, incapacitated, and Hanna and Blotchy have crawled back through their hole in the wall. Everything is well, despite the mild disappointment visible in the princes’ eyes. 

\--

They eat dinner with the royal family that night, as Cansrel stays in the questioning room with the newest prisoners. It is awkward and slow, with Fire and Bren eating quietly and avoiding eye contact with any of the princes or the princess. Nash beams at them all, mind fuzzy from the wine and Cansrel’s applying extra pressure earlier, and the queen is thoughtful but defended. The princes are, as usual, stony and blistering in both demeanor and mind, though the eldest is uncomfortably interested in Fire’s hair. 

Midway through, Hanna and her puppy tumble into the room and freeze at the sight of Bren and Fire. Bren smiles at her, and pets the puppy that flops against his leg excitedly. 

“Hello, Hanna,” he says to her, and Fire leans around him to nod a greeting as well. One of the princes growls, and they stare at him, startled. He rises from the table in disgust. 

“Hanna, you can eat in your rooms,” he grunts, and they go together, Blotchy loping behind gracelessly. 

The rest of the meal is even more silent than before.

\--

Cansrel returns furious. 

“It was an outside man,” he tells Fire and Bren as they sit in the gardens given to them. He has allowed the royal family entry at his children’s bequest but stares at them balefully until they bristle. Fire and Bren are sitting stiffly in their chairs, avoiding eye contact and carefully shielding their minds from him. He wouldn’t be angry with them for it; he’d probably celebrate that they wanted their own privacy. It is often strange to them, the way he allows them their freedoms so readily but becomes furious and jealous when others do the same. He despises the queen especially, with her ironclad mind, and the way she’s trained her children to do the same. 

Fire is watching Hanna play with her puppy wistfully. She knows Cansrel would never allow her to give birth to more monsters, and every child of a monster is a monster. 

But perhaps. If she had a human child of her own… Bren’s eyes turn to the princess, whom he might request an audience with when this is all over. If Cansrel doesn’t catch wind of his plot until it is nearly over, perhaps Bren’s sister could adopt an orphaned human child?

He will keep this to himself for now, but it requires thinking on.

\--

They are at dinner again that night. Cansrel is seethingly furious at the lack of a lead even with his powers and, in his own way, frightened for his children’s lives. Bren breathes out softly, gathering himself and making sure his mind is deep within his walls.

“Lady Clara,” he begins, abrupt and angry and forcing himself to slam his fork onto the table. He is doing this for Fire’s sake, and he will explain to the woman later. “It is unfortunate, but I must organize a punishment for my servants with you. They are performing substandard to my desires, and I wish to know your preferences for their punishments.” 

She watches him coolly; he cannot tell if she is fooled, due to her iron walls, but the servants are watching him fearfully and wondering at the ire in his tone, and so he must believe he was convincing enough. 

She nods, and they resume eating under Cansrel’s proud gaze.

\--

He waits until Lady Clara’s doors are closed behind them before releasing his breath. “My apologies, Lady,” he tells her earnestly. “My servants have been nothing but excellent. I simply needed your private confidence without my father’s knowledge.” He sits in her chair respectfully. She is still and wary. 

“What is it you wanted?” She finally asks him. 

“It’s my sister,” he says quietly. “She is lonely, and desires a child of her own. Cansrel would never allow her to continue the monster line, and she does not desire to. I was hoping you would be willing to allow her to care for a human child who has lost their own parents. She would be a devoted mother,” He begs her. She doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t look entirely closed to the topic.

\--

“Your minds,” he tells her later that day, “They are closed to us entirely. You have done an excellent job, all of your family. Even the young princess, Hanna. You should be proud.”

\--

As he walks back to his rooms, there is an odd sensation of someone breaching his mind by accident, as though they were grasping about for something and landed on him. It is painful, this invasion, enough so that even he screams and falls to his knees. It is coming through the door to his left. Inside, he believes, are the rooms of one of the princes, Hanna’s father. The youngest one.

He is screaming on the ground and clutching his head and trying, simultaneously, to wipe the memory of this instance from any who might take it back to Cansrel, who is in a murderous mood already, when the door opens. There is a creaking of wooden timbers, the soft stepping of feet, and a hand on the back of Bren’s neck. The pain lessens nigh immediately and Bren sags into the stones with a sigh, eyes unseeing and breathing raspy. 

“Sorry about that,” says the youngest prince. “We were testing ways of protecting our minds, and I guess it slipped out? Here, come inside.” 

The man’s voice is oddly neutral, but Bren has no way to remark upon it in his vulnerable state. He does allow himself the pain of using his mind while contacting Fire, who, up in their rooms, throws down her fiddle in a panic and orders the guards to take her to the youngest prince’s rooms, where her brother lies wounded. 

\--

Hanna is leaning over him, he realizes, as Blotchy’s nose investigates his stomach. Fire is shouting at someone, and crying, and Hanna looks very guilty indeed, and there is suddenly another voice raised in anger, and Fire cries out. 

Bren is awake very fast, and between the man (who appears to be the eldest prince) and his sister before he has a chance to stumble. 

_ BREN _ , shouts Fire into his mind, and he gasps from the pain of it as she apologizes aloud. There is a bruise on her cheek, in the shape and stylization of Nash’s ring. 

“We didn’t intend to hurt him!” Nash shouts, and looks taken aback when Bren growls at him.

“But it doesn’t really matter, does it, if the one hurting is a monster?” Bren asks, putting himself between the room and Fire as he inspects her cheek. She bites her lip as she watches the princes over his shoulder. 

“What happened?” She whispers. “Where did you go?”

“The princess’,” he tells her, and can tell the princes are listening in by the way they hiss angrily. “We had to discuss something, something for you.”

She stares at him for a moment. “Is it...that?” She asks him, and, knowing what she’s thinking of, he nods. 

\--

Cansrel knows they’re keeping something from him, but trusts them enough that he doesn’t suspect them of lying about something important to him. He doesn’t think they’d harm him; they’ve only been truly angry enough for that once, when he allowed Cutter to make a victim of Fire’s Small and hurt the poor, undeserving beast. For that, he had punished Cutter most fiercely and apologized to both of his children. 

\--

The queen is the one who brings it to their attention first, many weeks later. She is at their door in the morning, bursting through the doors and startling Fire from Bren’s lap by the fire where he is brushing her hair. Luckily together they maintain their hold on Cansrel’s mind where he’s lounging on the bed, relaxed and utterly at peace. The queen looks mildly disturbed at the sight of it.

“Lady Queen!” Exclaims Fire, hurriedly pinching her robe closed with her hands where it had fallen open in her fall. Bren, high on controlling Cansrel’s worst desires, allowed her to pull him to his feet. 

“There’s been another attack,” the queen tells Fire, because Bren certainly isn’t listening. There is a flurry of sudden activity, in which Fire dresses and attempts to fix Bren’s nightclothes into something presentable for royalty, and then they are out the door. Fire is careful to keep Bren deep into that lull of peace so that Cansrel won’t wake, but it frightens her to step into a room of aggressors with her only, closest friend this vulnerable. 

“Don’t worry, dear,” the queen tells her, and pats Bren’s hair. “I’ll keep an eye on him for you while you deal with this.” Fire nods hesitantly and steps into the room. 

\--

There is shouting at the sight of her, and speculative staring at Bren’s blank-eyed expression as he enters on the queen’s arm. The king is watching her with suspicious eyes as she gentles Bren’s lanky form into a soft chair. 

The ones they want her to examine are sitting at a far table. Hanna is sitting on her father’s lap, eyes red and teary, with Blotchy, bandaged and sighing, underneath their chair. The rest are guards or younger children. Many of them have heads that are...peculiarly foggy, as though they are drugged or unconscious. She frowns. 

“Friend,” She asks one guard, “Does your head feel fuzzy? Do you feel faint, or dizzy, or ill?” 

He nods hesitantly. She asks the next one, and one more, and they all respond positively. 

“My head hurts,” says one. She nods understandingly. Bren sighs again, and she glances at him, worried. “May I try to get rid of that for you?” She asks the man, but her attention is mostly on Bren when the man agrees. 

\--

He is floating. There is Cansrel’s worst nature in a cage in his mind and he must wrestle it into submission again and again. There is Fire-sister-other-half with her arm through his and walking him through the halls and letting him pet and braid her lovely hair. There is Queen-fear-smells-good-nice walking him to a chair and settling him into it and allowing him to hold her hand when Cansrel’s mind writhes against his control. The man wants this, wants the lack of control that comes with peace, but his very being rejects such a thing and fights them off. Every time they do this, either Bren or Fire must be the cage while the other is the soft, beguiling song that steadies Cansrel into a deep sleep and leaves him relaxed. 

He can handle the man on his own, he has done thing often enough without Fire’s aid, but there is something about this time that is different. There is someone...someone else trying to enter Cansrel’s mind. 

“Fire,” he says, “Fire, Fire, Fire,  _ help me _ ,” and she runs to his side, clutching his arm and sliding her mind in beside his to see what he’s fighting off. “Get out of there, get out,  _ he’s going to kill him, Fire, help me _ .” There is a great commotion in the room but he can’t pay attention to that, he is giving Cansrel back his defensive predilections and pointing him in the direction of his attacker, he is attaching to the slippery mind of the attacker but it  _ isn’t there _ ,  _ what kind of a man has no mind, Fire?  _

And then...and then, Cansrel’s mind disappears and he is screaming because his father is dead and he is suddenly so terribly sad and horribly relieved, and Fire is kneeling on the ground, shaken and sobbing with her eyes wide open, staring into the legs of Bren’s chair and he can feel her mind clasp to his and they are the same being today. They haven’t been the same being in a very long time.

But just for now, they are Briar, one and the same, alone in a land without the one person outside of the themselves who understood them without needing any explanation, at the mercy of people who hate them. 

\--

Somehow they stand, hand in hand. They turn to the queen together, ignoring the puppet king (now without strings), and bow silently, faces very blank. They return to their rooms, with an entourage of royalty at their heels. They enter their rooms. There is a body on the floor; it used to be Cansrel’s, and now there is nothing. There is a man going through Fire’s things. He pauses at the sight of them, his eyes differently colored, and when Briar leaps for him, their knives drawn from hidden stashes on their bodies, he yells for them to wait. But they don’t wait; there is no need to wait. They have found the man without a mind, whom not even Cansrel, in all his years of experience, could defeat. The strange, confusing fog he emits has no effect on them. He is dead before he even finishes the word, and they are stepping away from the body. They are ready to leave this place that they despise and which despises them in return. 

They are leaving in the morning, and there is nothing that could call them back. 

\--

It has been seven years. Fire gave birth to twins several years ago, now that Cansrel has gone. Their father did not want to stay with a monster woman for a wife and indeed she did not want him for a husband. Bren is their father and their uncle and he loves them, Fire’s little Ash and Coal. Ash has eyes like a purpling thundercloud and hair like a raven’s feathers with skin like a winter’s snow. Coal is more like Fire, with eyes like a summer sky and hair like a blaze. His skin is a deeper, darker shade of brown than his mother’s and brother’s, warm as caramel. 

They do not talk about Cansrel much. They don’t talk about why the queen regent still writes them letters, or why the current king’s younger brother sends them horses that don’t bite or rear or kick. They don’t need to. 

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't really like how the first chapter ends, so I plan on "renovating" it at some point, but I felt the rest of it (an old project found in a folder) was a cool idea that I'd like to explore further, so. Expect more at some point I guess?


End file.
